If you'll look at the Guidelines for HN linked at the bottom of the page, you'll note that whether a submission is productive is not a criterion.
You could perhaps make an argument that among the flood of AI-related submissions, this one doesn't particularly move the needle on intellectual curiosity. Although satire is generally a good way to allow for some reflection on a serious topic, and I don't recall seeing AI-related satire here in a while.
Others have given some answer to who was made poorer by Ballmer holding Microsoft shares, but I'd argue that this is the wrong question. Instead of looking at a specific individual, we should look at systems.
A system that allows this kind of extreme wealth accumulation is quite fundamentally at odds with democracy because extreme wealth can be and is in practice used to influence politics in a way that undermines democracy.
Some people might not care about that, but if your goal is improving the outcomes of the largest number of people, then pretty much everything else is secondary to having a functioning democracy.
This is genuinely the only response I ever get - that wealth can be used to influence politics. In my view this is a poor argument for two reasons.
1. The amount wealth actually influences politics is hard to measure but likely much lower than most people assume. Trump was outspent significantly both times he won. Bloomberg dropped $1B in a couple months and won nowhere but American Somoa. Probably the two biggest boogiemen, Koch and Soros, have spent billions over the years on their causes, and the present administration and general overton window is actually something neither of them like! The nonelected king-makers in American and EU politics are not actually wealthy people at all, just those with a lot of accumulated political capital, for instance, Jim Clyburn who single-handedly gave the 2020 nomination to Biden.
2. The amount that it takes to finance initiatives is much lower than centibillionaire level. Is the original $20B OP mentioned not sufficient to finance some ballot initiative? Why is it the increase to $130B that causes concern? The truth is that even a wealthy non-billionaire can easily do that, or bankroll someone's run for congress, or fund a partisan thinktank. The maximum level of wealth you'd have to set your ban-limit at would be problematically low.
I just find it hard to take the 3x claims at face value because actual code generation is only a small part of my job, and so Amdahl's law currently limits any productivity increase from agentic AI to well below 2x for me.
(And I believe I'm fairly typical for my team. While there are more junior folks, it's not that I'm just stuck with powerpoint or something all day. Writing code is rarely the bottleneck.)
So... either their job is really just churning out code (where do these jobs exist, and are there any jobs like this at all that still care about quality?) or the most generous explanation that I can think of is that people are really, really bad at self-evaluations of productivity.
Good on you for having the meta-cognition to recognize it.
I've graded many exams in my university days (and set some myself), and it's exceedingly obvious that that's what many students are doing. I do wonder though how often they manage to fly under the radar. I'm sure it happens, as you described.
(This is also the reason why I strongly believe that in exams where students write free-form answers, points should be subtracted for incorrect statements even if a correct solution is somewhere in the word salad.)
> don't have infinite different copies of the int64_t type
You can make some, though!
Basically, the idea is to define a class template NoAlias<T, Tag> that contains a single value of type T. Implement operators etc. to make the type useful in practice for working with the wrapped value. Type-based alias rules mean that an access to the value wrapped in NoAlias<int64_t, Tag1> can never alias a value wrapped in NoAlias<int64_t, Tag2>. (Tag1 and Tag2 can just be forward-declared structs that are never defined.)
One time, I even encountered a situation where this was mildly useful.
Fair point, yeah. The general concept should still apply, you could maybe wrap it in some macros, but it is going to be more awkward mostly because of the lack of operator overloading.
Yeah, I meant specifically C in an ergonomic way with operators working on them and being passable to existing functions.
Though wrapping in different structs doesn't seem to even make gcc & clang properly optimize utilizing the types as non-aliasing: https://godbolt.org/z/r1MT9W9db. Clang just completely fails to do anything, but gcc somehow manages to reorder the load but not do the trivial part of constant-propagating afterwards..
hope all you want i think understanding what this site reveals about the world view of investor/dev types is a kind of sociological? shock.
its like everyone learning during covid their neighbors would kill every service worker to avoid the inconvenience of making their own coffee. it leaves a mark.
see what happened to the poor n-gate.com fellow, burned him out
Given two version (old and new) of a Git change (i.e., individual commit or patch series from a pull request) it produces a diff that is actually useful for reviewing purposes, assuming you've already reviewed the old version of the change.
It's sort of like `git range-diff`, but where `git range-diff` produces a "diff of diffs" that is very hard to impossible to read, this tool gives you a direct diff between old and new versions, but filters out any irrelevant changes that were introduced because the author rebased on a more recent version of the target branch.
I hope that makes sense - I never know quite how to put it into words for somebody to understand who isn't intimately familiar with Git. It is very powerful though if you combine it with a minimal amount of setup e.g. for fetching all PR branches from a GitHub repository. I use it almost daily as part of my code review workflow.
I'm the author of DiffLens (https://www.difflens.com/). I initially built it for myself too (and use it everyday) and it's currently free for anyone to try. It's an attempt to use abstract syntax trees to make diffs more readable. Happy to see another diff project here!
This sounds very cool! I recently moved from a FAANG company to a smaller one, and I'm _really_ missing the functionality their development tools provided (including this, which I agree is fantastic and sorely missing from the core GitHub experience).
Maybe you can put a small example of code changes that illustrates this. The diagram helps but actual output based on a toy example would drive it home, I think.
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